OC
by ghostmanflake
Summary: What will happen when my OC transfers into Ryoo High School from Lucky Star? Find out!
1. Chapter 1

"Man, I'm feeling kinda down now that I'm done watching Lucky Star," He said.

"I sorta miss the characters already," He said.

"I wish there was some way for me to interact with them, in their world," He said.

Hiiragi Kagami's feeling of guilt was matched only by the searing pain in her leg. As she plodded away from the high school, she attempted to justify the act of supreme cowardice of which she was guilty.

"There was nothing I could have done," she said, feigning her usual air of practicality.

Behind her, the students of Ryoo High rushed from the school, crowding and trampling one another chaotically. Few were certain of what had happened, but the general panic created a positive feedback loop and incited a stampede perilous enough to justify itself. All anyone knew for sure was that there existed a strong incentive to escape the vicinity of the school.

Kagami was nearly a block ahead of the worst of the mob, but was losing ground fast thanks to her injury. For a moment she glanced back at the screaming crowd and smouldering building, as concern for her friend temporarily superceded self interest. A sob welled up in her throat.

Takara Miyuki wondered whether she was going to die. Her memory and vision equally blurry, she lay on the cold floor of what she could be reasonably sure was her classroom. She was certain she had been injured, as her muscles didn't seem functional enough to respond to commands from her brain, but she was far too numb and blind to ascertain her own status. In her confused haze she couldn't even muster negative emotion.

Izumi Konata burst nimbly from the confused crowd, dragging the panicking Hiiragi Tsukasa behind her. The two were able to gradually increase their distance from the wall of students, Konata tightening her grip on Tsukasa's wrist every time the latter threatened to trip. Gasping, the two made it to a grassy hill nearby the school, away from the mob's path. Those running without destination are rarely inclined toward uphill slopes. As Konata turned to gaze at the chaos, Tsukasa fell to her knees.

"What… what happened back there?"

Konata glanced at her wheezing friend. "I'm not sure."

"Do… do you think everyone… made it out?"

Only a shrug in response, as Konata stared absently ahead.

Kagami was startled back into reality by a harsh grip on her shoulder. She looked up to see her friend's cousin, Narumi Yui, looking uncharacteristically severe. Brandishing her police badge, Yui shouted, "Get to the ambulance!"

Behind the policewoman Kagami made out several emergency vehicles, as well as a number of stern looking police officers and a squad of firemen. Suddenly she noticed the blare of sirens, which she had somehow missed in her daze. Uniformed men rushed past her to tend to the burning school and calm the mob.

Yui marched Kagami to the open doors of an ambulance and gestured to a stretcher. Kagami gingerly lay down, her leg dripping blood onto the white sheet beneath her, and asked, "Aren't you a traffic officer?"

"I'm authorized to help where I can," Yui stated, before returning to the scene of disaster.

Without even recognizing her fatigue, Kagami fell fast asleep.

Miyuki hadn't noticed the feeling return to her arm, but now she frantically scoured the floor for her glasses. Her drive for self preservation was also back online. Adrenaline rushed through her system, heightening the feeling of triumph when her hand brushed the metal frame of her spectacles, and the feeling of despair when her fingertips found their jagged lenses. Miraculously, however, only one pane had shattered. Clarity washed over Miyuki's left eye.

Immediately she searched for her wound. Her bloodsoaked uniform indicated a gash on the left side of her torso, but it was not until she lifted her shirt that she understood the severity of her condition. Was it her imagination, or could she see a rib bone? The base of knowledge which had earned Miyuki her reputation told her to stop the bleeding, but her limbs once again failed her, and she fainted a moment before hitting the floor.

As she came to, Miyuki's glasses were handed back to her by a flesh colored blur. Weakly bringing the lenses to her face, she looked about to see a small camp composed of vehicles and stretchers, overseen by unsympathetic looking police officers. Nurses tended to the wounds of students trampled in the mass exodus. To her left she could make out Kagami, sleeping, her leg being bandaged by masked doctors.

"How do you feel?" asked the nurse standing before Miyuki.

"Okay," was the instinctive reply, but it came out as little more that a croak. "Water… water, please," she managed. The lukewarm drink handed to her in a paper cup seemed to burn her throat, but still made her feel somewhat better.

"I… " But she got no further, and entered into a coughing fit. Her hand came away from her mouth red and glistening.


	2. Chapter 2

"I have an idea," He said.

"I could write myself into the world of Lucky Star," He said.

"I'll be a transfer student, and make friends with all the girls," He said.

Konata and Tsukasa made their way into the suburbs of their city, leaving behind the sounds of screams and sirens. Wordlessly, the two wandered through the unfamiliar streets, past identical houses and meaningless signs. Their normal route home would have taken them right through the thick of the chaos. As the sky faded to orange and their shadows grew long, the girls passed a police car rushing in the opposite direction. Brakes screeched, a door slammed, and a police officer stood before them.

"Are those uniforms from Ryoo?" asked the officer, face shaded ominously by the setting sun behind him.

"Yeah," said Konata."

"You two had better come with me."

Reluctantly, Konata and Tsukasa filed into the police car. Despite the circumstances, years of conditioning had taught the girls to dread this exact experience. Law enforcement vehicles were absolutely not to be viewed from inside.

"Pretty roomy in here," said Konata, putting her legs up on the dashboard. Tsukasa giggled appreciatively at the attempt to lighten the mood.

"Sit up straight," said the officer.

Before long the car halted in front of a police station. The officer slammed his door behind him, then turned to the girls and gestured for them to follow. With his face visible, Tsukasa thought he looked almost friendly. She opened her door, then waited for Konata to exit the car so she could follow. The officer held open the glass door of the station before leading the girls through a lobby and down a hallway.

"My name is Officer Tamazaki. You two are going to be asked a few questions about the accident at Ryoo High School." The group entered a large room full of chairs, with a number of Ryoo students sitting privately or talking amongst themselves.

"Um…" Tsukasa whispered. Officer Tamazaki turned to her.

"What is it?" He asked. His voice was sharp, but his face showed no hint of impatience.

"When… can we go home?"

Tamazaki smiled gently. "Questioning shouldn't take long. Most students don't know anything about the incident, so you'll be up pretty soon. After that, I can drive you both to your homes."

Konata and Tsukasa sat in the two chairs furthest from the door, and watched the roomful of students come and go.

"What do you think will happen to us?" Tsukasa whispered.

Konata leaned back in her chair. "They'll probably play 'good cop, bad cop.' You know, one guy threatens to beat us up, while the other guy tries to get us to admit to blowing up the school," she said matter-of-factly.

"Really?"

"At least, that's how it works on TV."

A policewoman stepped into the room, glanced at a clipboard, and motioned to Konata. "You, come with me." The two disappeared into a doorway on the wall opposite Tsukasa, leaving her to clench her stomach in apprehension. Hours seemed to pass. Surely night had fallen? The room lacked windows or a clock, and this absence of a reference only compounded her disorientation.

Familiar voices brought Tsukasa back to her senses. To her left, Officer Tamazaki was ushering Kagami into the waiting room. The latter was bandaged and leaning on crutches, but looked her usual haughty self. She noticed Tsukasa and hobbled over to the back corner of the room.

"Glad to see you're okay," she said, awkwardly adjusting her crutches as she sat down.

"What happened to you?"

"My leg was hurt in the… accident."

"Oh." Still nervous, Tsukasa stared fixedly at the white cinderblock wall. The abrasive laughter of the other students broke the constant hum of fluorescent lights.

After a moment's silence, she turned back to her sister. "Did you see what happened? Back… at the classroom?"

"I don't know." The obvious lie, intended to communicate rather than convince, put a quick stop to the conversation.

The sisters sat uncomfortably for an unmeasurable stretch of time. Lost in thought, Kagami experienced mere minutes, while the restless Tsukasa endured ages. After a quarter of an hour, or perhaps a millennium, the policewoman returned with Konata in tow. Tsukasa visibly winced as the officer pointed in her direction.

"Come with me."

Konata went for a high five as Tsukasa passed, but was met with nothing but a desperate gaze. Patting her friend on the shoulder, she walked casually into the waiting room and over to Kagami, who looked up exasperatedly.

"Oh, I see you survived as well." Kagami employed all her sarcasm in an attempt to mask her relief.

Konata laughed. "Good to see you, too. Listen, I gotta split. My anime starts in about ten minutes."

"Oh yeah, could you tell me what time it is?"

"About 17:30. There's a clock in the interrogation room. Anyway, see ya!"

Kagami sighed as her friend went racing down the hallway and ducked around a corner. She listened for a moment to the angered shouts of "Slow down!" and "No running!" which ensued, before returning to her introspection. Could she really tell the police what she had seen? They would only accuse her of imagining things. Perhaps, she hoped, she had been imagining things, but she couldn't bring herself to believe it. The sane and mad are equally certain of their experiences.

"You, with the crutches." Ignoring her sister's proffered hug, Kagami heaved upward onto her metal legs and staggered after the policewoman.


	3. Chapter 3

"But just being a normal student would be boring," He said.

"I should give myself special powers, or something like that," He said.

"Yeah, I'll make myself omnipotent. After all, it's just a fantasy," He said.

Kagami clattered down the dim hallway after the policewoman, still not sure of what to say. The matter was not so simple as 'just tell the truth.' The truth seemed crazy, and unless proof of what she had seen emerged, she risked being sent to a mental hospital.

The policewoman held a plywood door open, and, limping through it, Kamagi discovered a scene worthy of a low budget crime show. Behind a plastic table sat an officer in thick sunglasses shuffling a deck of cards. The room's two decorations were a distractingly large analog clock hanging from the wall, and a brown stain on the floor emanating from the far corner. As if to add to the surrealism, the policewoman locked the door behind them.

It's not as though I could escape if I tried, Kagami thought. Setting down her crutches, she sat across from the officer. Was he looking at her? It was impossible to tell. Eventually, he put his cards down.

"Name?"

"Hiiragi Kagami."

The officer seemed to be staring directly at her. Challengingly, Kagami glared into his abyssal lenses. She wouldn't let this chubby, ridiculous looking man intimidate her. She was going to report exactly what she had seen, and he had better believe it.

"Well?" the officer grunted. He, for his part, had been listening to inconclusive testimony for hours, and was sick of talking to brainless teenagers.

Standing by the door, the policewoman coughed politely. "Why don't you tell us what you know about the fire," she said, with a sidelong glance at the officer.

"Oh, right." Kagami looked down at her knees, no longer sure of whom to address. "Um… last month, a foreign exchange student came to our school from America. His name was—"

"An American!" The officer sat up excitedly. "So he started the fire?"

The policewoman rolled her eyes. "Go on," she prompted.

"His name was Henry. He wasn't in my class, but a few friends and I would always hang out with him at lunch and after school. After he showed up he seemed to… to take control of our group. Somehow, our conversations always seemed to revolve around him. He decided where to go, and what to do.

"Henry also seemed to be good at pretty much everything. He got the highest test scores in the school, fought off older kids that would bother us, won every event at our school's fair… He always made a show of being nice to people. Everybody liked him."

"Get to the point." The officer returned to shuffling his deck. Kagami looked to the policewoman for reassurance, but even she looked a little bored. Embarrassed, she hurriedly continued.

"This afternoon, though, I was visiting my friends' classroom to retrieve a textbook, and I saw Miyuki—I mean, one of my friends spill some water on Henry by accident. After that his face got all contorted… almost like he was pouting, or something. He was usually pretty calm, so I didn't think water would really bother him… and then…"

"And then?"

"His… his eyes glowed, and he looked like a gust of wind was blowing his hair upward… and then the room exploded. My friend… she got a full blast of it, and fell over… a piece of something hit me in the leg… and everyone started screaming. I got out as fast as I could."

The deck of cards spilled onto the floor. The officer gawked for a moment, before breaking into uproarious laughter. The policewoman glared at him until he calmed down, then turned to Kagami.

"Are you certain you're feeling alright?" she said.

"You weren't maybe hit in the head, as well as the leg?" interjected the officer, stifling a chuckle.

"I feel fine," said Kagami. Her face burned, and tears threatened to escape her eyes.

The policewoman looked sympathetically down at her. "It's alright if you don't know anything, dear, but I'm afraid your story doesn't explain the fire. Our investigators believe that it was started in a storage closet, not a classroom."

As it happened, a student had been smoking in this closet when the fleeing mob reached it, at which point he had dropped his lit cigarette on a pile of papers and escaped the building. This information, however, was known to him alone.

"It's true, though," insisted Kagami. She cursed the woman for feeling sorry for her, as a tear dripped down her cheek.

"I think I understand. You were jealous of your friend—"

"If that were true, wouldn't I use a more believable story?" she asked.

The policewoman kneeled until Kagami's bloodshot eyes were level with her own. "I think you should talk to Henry about how you feel. I'm sure he isn't trying to steal your friends from you."

I thought you were on my side, thought Kagami. Out loud, she said "Alright. May I go home?"

"Of course. Do you need a ride?"

"No, thanks."

But Kagami had no plans to go home. I'll show them, she thought, as she hobbled back to the school.


	4. Chapter 4

"But I'll make myself laid back and apathetic as well," He said.

"That way I can be powerful, but I won't just bypass the plot," He said.

"It would be really funny to, I dunno, overreact to something and blow up the school," He said.

The sun still high in the sky, Yui waded through the thinning crowd and toward the abandoned school building. As she approached the doors, a fireman halted her.

"Hey, you can't go in there. We're still searching for people."

"Have you found my cousin?" Desperation crept into Yui's voice. "She's short, with blue hair…"

"I don't know," he said apologetically.

"Then I'm going in." She stepped past the fireman, who made no attempt to stop her. Instead, he looked after her with a sympathetic expression.

Yui made a right and ascended a staircase, attempting to recall the exact location of Konata's classroom. She had only visited Ryoo once in recent memory, and on that occasion she had simply waited at the front desk while an attendant paged her cousin. Giving up, she began glancing into each room as she passed.

With each empty classroom Yui grew more and more hopeless. Those logical fallacies intrinsic to the human mind nagged at her. I should have found Konata by now, she thought, as though each place in the school presented an equally likely hiding spot. Her steps slowed. A feeling of intense melancholy settled in her mind, seemingly adding lead weights to her feet. The professional expression of a police officer held back an ocean of tears. Finally succumbing to her irrational misery, Yui leaned back against the doorframe of an empty classroom. The air around her glowed, as dust and ash were ignited by the afternoon sunlight streaming in from an open window. The halls, littered with trampled belongings, became a hazy dream.

"Help!"

A faint cry kicked Yui's nervous system back to life. She rushed out into the hallway, searching for the source of the noise. Nearly at the end of the hall a student lay on the ground, his leg bent at an odd angle. Yui rushed over to him.

"Are you alright?"

"I fell down the stairs… I think my leg's broken."

The student's pant leg was pulled back, revealing a crimson inflammation right below the knee. Yui looked it over.

"I think I can set this, but I'll need a first aid kit. Do you know where I can find one?"

"Every room should have one, behind the teacher's desk."

"I'll get one. Don't go anywhere."

The student let out a pained chuckle. Yui rushed to the nearest classroom and made it halfway to the teacher's desk before she noticed the scorch marks along the floor. At her feet lay the decimated remnants of a wooden chair. Her eyes traveled along the burnt black streaks, past splinters and a pool of dark liquid, and rested on the student standing at the far end of the room, with his back to her.

Yui shook her head. This student couldn't have been responsible for the fire, which had been started on the ground floor. Still, the dark stain bothered her. She chastised herself for being so nervous, and spoke up.

"Hey kid, what are you doing in here?"

No response. Yui took a step toward him, and tried again.

"They're evacuating the building. You should come with me."

Slowly, deliberately, the student turned to face her. The pit of her stomach seemed to give way: a wide, almost skeletal smile was stretched across his face, and two glowing yellow sparks peered from his shaded eye sockets. Yui stumbled back. The student took a menacing step forward, as illuminated ash swirled around him. Rational or not, Yui decided, she was going to treat this creature as dangerous.

Heart pounding, she dashed back to the crippled student and helped him up.

"What's going on?" he demanded.

"We have need to get out."

"What about my leg?"

In response Yui started forward, acting as a crutch for the student, who winced with every one legged leap. Behind them echoed the slow, even footsteps of the monster.

One of the universe's many oddities is its intrinsic balance of power. Nowhere will you find something unequivocally better than a given alternative; rather, there are pros and cons to every available option, to every organism, structure, or circumstance. Perhaps this is due to the instability of imbalanced systems: when one thing is better than another in every way, the latter simply dies off. Perhaps it is due to some karmic force, or to fate.

Whatever the reason, the ability to wreak havoc is often inversely proportional to the desire to do so. It is for this reason that the world is not instantly destroyed by the greatest forces within it, and it is for this reason that the beast in Yui's wake chose to play a game of cat-and-mouse.

Without the ability to judge the speed or distance of the creature, Yui was forced to endure the sound of footstep after footstep with mounting dread. Unable to stand her apprehension any longer, she glanced behind her. Nothing. Even the metronomic sound had stopped. Suddenly terrified, she whipped her head frantically around, searching for any sign of the monster.

Drenched in a cold sweat, Yui lugged her passenger down the seemingly endless hallway. If she could only make it outside, she thought, they would be safe. Instinct told her, however erroneously, that no predator would dare attack a large crowd. Hope welled up within her. They were almost to that initial staircase…

Suddenly those soulless embers were directly before Yui's eyes. Falling to the floor, the crippled student let out a yell, and Yui felt her own heart almost stop. The creature was smiling, if possible, even wider than usual.

With her arm now free, Yui whipped out her handgun and held it to the creature's face, fighting to keep it steady. Amused, the creature pointed at the crippled student. Yui turned to see him writhing in agony as his skin crackled and erupted into flame. She fired a round directly into the creature's uncanny grin, only to hear the bullets drop harmlessly to the floor. Losing all hope she sprinted down the hall, cleared the staircase in two bounds, and burst out of the school's front doors, while the creature laughed inhumanly.

The fireman still stood there. "What's wrong?" he asked. "I thought I heard gunshots!"

Yui passed him and addressed the group of officers standing near their vehicles. All around her nurses, firemen, police, and students turned to determine the source of commotion.

"Bring backup!" she shouted. "There's… something in there!"


End file.
